Quest

Re “Apache tribe fights for place in N.M.,” Jan. 14 Reading about the Fort Sill Apache tribe's plight left me with mixed emotions. For federal agents to have forcibly removed tribal members from their ancestral New Mexico homeland more than 100 years ago constitutes an unfathomable travesty. On the other hand, the tribe's intent to open a gambling casino if it returns to New Mexico disappoints me. Studies show that gaming enterprises are far more detrimental than beneficial to the larger society; gambling's social costs outweigh its economic benefits many times over.

WASHINGTON - Daniel Swalm was researching his family when he came across a disturbing episode in immigration history. That discovery would lead to a move in the U.S. Senate to apologize for action the nation took more than a century ago. Swalm discovered that under an obscure 1907 law, his grandmother Elsie, born and raised in Minnesota, was stripped of her U.S. citizenship after marrying an immigrant from Sweden. Swalm had never heard of the Expatriation Act that required a U.S.-born woman who married a foreigner to "take the nationality of her husband.

RE "The Showoff and the Showman," March 26: For your readers interested in the search behind the discovery of "The Betrayal of Christ," Jonathan Harr's "The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece" reads like a detective novel. The reader is led from a dusty basement archive in Italy to a modest seminary in Dublin, where the painting is located. CAROL AHUJA East Highland

Marsha Temple will soon fly to Philadelphia, trying to crack a case she's been working on for decades. She'd like to know who her biological father was. Temple has a pretty good hunch he may have been a child evangelist in Philadelphia nearly a century ago, so she plans to dig through files there with the help of her husband, KCRW radio host Warren Olney, who serves as Watson to his wife's Sherlock. The two have traveled great distances in the U.S. and to Poland and Ukraine, pursuing an obsession that for Temple, 68, began many years ago in the San Fernando Valley.

There is a sense of despair when it comes to privacy in the digital age. Many of us assume that so much of our electronic information is now compromised, whether by corporations or government agencies, that there is little that can be done about it. Sometimes we try to rationalize this by telling ourselves that privacy may no longer matter so much. After all, an upstanding citizen should have nothing to fear from surveillance. In "Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance," author Julia Angwin seeks to challenge that defeatism.

Heather Mills, the former wife of Beatles singer Paul McCartney, has spent the last two years mounting a serious effort to qualify for the 2014 Paralympic Games in Sochi, Russia. Now, it seems, her quest to make the British ski team has ended. Mills, who had her left leg amputated below the knee after a 1993 accident, announced that she has suffered an injury related to friction with her prosthetic and will not be able to compete in the Games. Her management company said the 45-year-old was “devastated,” according to insidethegames.biz.

Nissan nails unconventional. One has only to spend some time driving the all-electric Leaf, the spunky Juke crossover or the anomalous Murano CrossCabriolet to know this is a company that takes risks — and succeeds from them. So one would think such a forward-thinking carmaker would have no trouble bringing innovation and appeal to the table when it came time to redo something as blase as a minivan. Nope. The Nissan Quest returns to the U.S. for 2011 after a yearlong hiatus.

A Tribe Called Quest will headline the 2013 H2O Music Festival, Univision revealed exclusively to Pop & Hiss on Tuesday. The groundbreaking alternative hip-hop group joins a previously announced roster that includes Ne-Yo, Roberto Tapia, La Santa Cecilia, Prince Royce and Frankie J. H2O Music Festival hits Los Angeles State Historic Park on Aug. 17, and tickets are currently on sale. PHOTOS: Concerts by The Times Univision Communications, the nation's largest Spanish-language media company, launched the festival in 2012.

When it comes to fitness, Americans may not be stepping up -- enough. In the quest to log a recommended 10,000 steps a day, Americans trail other countries in daily walking, according to a recent University of Tennessee study . Australia and Switzerland lead the pack with adults taking 9,695 and 9,650 daily steps, respectively, while the U.S. comes in with just 5,117 steps. So let’s not wait until the new year to start making the effort. A pedometer (and not even a fancy one)

The word on Blake Griffin has changed. All he does is debunk. Lest anyone is still clinging to the ridiculous belief that he is just a dunking marvel, the Clippers forward offered another retort Wednesday night at Staples Center. He led fastbreaks. He made midrange jumpers. He flung smart passes to open teammates. Problem was, not enough of those teammates showed up during the Clippers' too-little, too-late 107-101 loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder. Griffin and Chris Paul came to play, but they aren't going to take the Clippers anywhere playing two on five.

Germs and detectives might not seem like they're connected. But their link, as a certain fictitious sleuth might say, is elementary. In Thomas Goetz's fascinating and entertaining new page turner of a book, "The Remedy: Robert Koch, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Quest to Cure Tuberculosis," we are transported to the final decades of the 19th century. The age of electricity was dawning. And in laboratories and on imaginary London streets, men armed with microscopes and the power of observation first used science to tackle the twin scourges of crime and disease.

The 40-year debate over affirmative action at state universities generally has been conducted in terms of general principles. At first, advocates emphasized the importance of compensating African Americans (and later others) for the effects of generations of discrimination, while opponents contended that the Constitution must be colorblind. Later, the debate shifted to the claim that there are educational benefits to a racially diverse student body, a rationale for preferences that the Supreme Court grudgingly has accepted.

There is a sense of despair when it comes to privacy in the digital age. Many of us assume that so much of our electronic information is now compromised, whether by corporations or government agencies, that there is little that can be done about it. Sometimes we try to rationalize this by telling ourselves that privacy may no longer matter so much. After all, an upstanding citizen should have nothing to fear from surveillance. In "Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance," author Julia Angwin seeks to challenge that defeatism.

OKLAHOMA CITY - Oklahoma traces its contemporary history to pioneers who populated the prairies. Now, new urban pioneers are repopulating the capital, Oklahoma City, as restaurateurs re-imagine landmark buildings and create new communities around them. They could hardly have come at a better time: The local economy is booming, and Forbes ranks OKC as the nation's eighth-fastest-growing city, thanks to thriving oil, gas and wind-power sectors as well as fracking. I was here in September for a consulting job, and I extended my stay to find these restaurants with a previous life.

Since 1946, the San Diego Museum of Art has owned an appealing vision of happy prosperity: Frans Hals' 1630s painting of a plump, rosy-cheeked Dutch merchant whose expression and body language exude confidence, security and bonhomie. In the early 1990s, on one of his infrequent visits to Los Angeles from Europe, Bernard Goodman asked his son, Simon, to take him to see it. Standing in front of the portrait of Isaac Abrahamsz Massa, Bernard for the first time permitted a crack in what his son calls "the brick wall of silence" that had confronted him and his older brother, Nick, all their lives.

In Sarah Polley's unconventional documentary, "Stories We Tell," "truth" is a relative term when family secrets are involved. The Canadian actress-writer-director's quest is resolving her parentage. Did she have another father, as childhood teasing suggested, in addition to the beloved Michael Polley, who raised her and thought her his own? Her mother, Diane, died when Polley was 11. Had she lived, perhaps Polley would have had the answer long ago and the film left uncontemplated. In Diane's absence, everyone has opinions - family members, her mother's friends and lovers.

"I see this more as a philosophical exhibition than a history of space and flight," says Stephen White. He's talking about "Skydreamers: A Saga of Air and Space," an expansive show of photographs and related materials — largely drawn from his collection — that's opening Friday at the Autry National Center in Griffith Park and runs through Sept. 4. "I don't know much about the technical aspects of aviation," he says. "What interests me is how photography interacts with what we call progress.

At last, they marched. On Saturday, dozens of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender immigrants marched in the annual Tet parade in Little Saigon. The rainbow flag, a distinctive symbol of gay pride, fluttered alongside emblems of California, the United States and South Vietnam. "We love you," participants yelled at friends, family members and thousands of others lining the parade route in Westminster, many dressed to celebrate the Lunar New Year. "We love you, too," some eager youths responded, whistling with joy. The historic moment followed months of fighting as organizers initially sought to ban LGBT activists from joining one of the community's biggest events.

Re “Apache tribe fights for place in N.M.,” Jan. 14 Reading about the Fort Sill Apache tribe's plight left me with mixed emotions. For federal agents to have forcibly removed tribal members from their ancestral New Mexico homeland more than 100 years ago constitutes an unfathomable travesty. On the other hand, the tribe's intent to open a gambling casino if it returns to New Mexico disappoints me. Studies show that gaming enterprises are far more detrimental than beneficial to the larger society; gambling's social costs outweigh its economic benefits many times over.